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Collaboration in E-Discovery
E-Discovery involves several people from different teams collaborating to complete the discovery process. Lack of collaboration between the different teams can lead to time constraints, increased costs and duplication of work. The discovery process used to involve searching through multiple paper files and supplementing information from electronic documents. However, now that documents are becoming stored electronically the focus has shifted from paper to digital. According to the article “Collaboration in E-Discovery”, by Prateek Kathpal the cost of the review process can be up to 80% of the total cost of the e-discovery process. Some technologies that help limit the costs of the review stage and encourage collaboration are: · Full text extensive search – search engines examine all the words in every stored document allowing users to filter the search according to the category being examined. · Document viewing with remote accessibility – since there are many different types of documents (pdf, word, email formats, etc.) selecting a multi-tasking viewer can help collaborators view the information from their desktops or even mobile devices to aid in the discovery process. · Annotations, mark-ups and redactions – annotated versions can be updated and shared through the process while still preserving the original document. Using these tools allows the users to highlight, color code and type notes regardless of the document format, as well as, the ability to remove sensitive information permanently so the document is safe to share with the opposing legal team. · Digital rights management '''– is the ability to enable the assignment of document permissions at the user level in order to make the document read only and control the printing or navigating across collaborators, departments or partners. Using these technologies can help save money and enable easier collaboration to facilitate the litigation procedure. My Reflection: '''I honestly had no idea what e-discovery was before I read this paper. After reading the articles it is clear to me that moving towards e-discovery is the way to go, especially regarding cost savings. Although I do not work in a predominantly legal environment, at Research Services we have to be compliant with the granting agencies regarding certifications (ethics) and retention of files in case of auditing or legal issues. A few of the issues were very relevant for me in this paper. One was the problem with having so many versions of the information saved, kept and being generated so it is harder to find the information we actually need. This is an issue in our office with multiple grant applications being emailed from the researcher to our facilitators, then multiple versions and final versions are floated around the office in emails, the database, hard copy and our shared drive. This would cost our office more money regarding the time and effort it would take to find the relevant information from the correct source. Another issue that we are facing in our office is the uploading of confidential data such as research contracts to our database. In reading about the new technological tools being implemented to allow collaboration for e-discovery it gave me context in which I can approach my managers about using digital rights management in order to effectively share documents for collaboration but maintain the confidential information.